NO CLEAN SINGING

NECROPHOBIC: “IN THE TWILIGHT GREY”

Mar 192024

(Below you’ll find DGR‘s review of the new album by Sweden’s Necrophobic, released on March 15th by Century Media Records.)

Mark this as one of the most profound statements you’ll ever read on this site: As NCS has grown older and followed the careers of many a heavy metal band, we seem to be reviewing more and more albums that have hit double-digits in a band’s discography. Who would’ve thought the passage of time would be such a crazy thing?

It’s taken Sweden’s Necrophobic a while to get there – their first having been released in 1993 – but they’ve actually kept to a surprisingly consistent amount of time between albums over the years. They’ve never fully fallen into the ‘every two-to-three-years’ album schedule that many career bands do, and beginning with 2002’s Bloodhymns, the gaps between albums have remained steady, hovering at around three-and-a-half to four years. Continue reading »

AN NCS DOUBLE PREMIERE: HERXHEIM AND MANASSEH

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Mar 192024

Why do we have two song premieres from forthcoming albums paired together in this article? Here’s a multiple choice quiz for you:

a) the albums are being released on the same day
b) the albums are being released by the same label
c) both bands are the work of the same person
d) it makes it easier for us to melt your brains
e) all of the above
f) none of the above

Make your selection and find the answer after the jump. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GRIMTONE — “GRAINS OF SAND”

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Mar 182024

In the context of the song premiere we’re about to bring you now, it’s a relevant coincidence that today is the birthday of Wilfred Owen, one of the first poets to depict the horrifying realities of war, instead of writing glorified, nationalistic verse. He served in the British army during World War I and was killed in battle at the age of 25. Here’s his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth“:

AN NCS PREMIERE: VENOMOUS ECHOES — “OCULAR MALTOSIS OV SCHIZOPHRENIA”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Mar 182024

(As you can see, we have a song premiere, but first, an album review.)

After listening to parts of Venomous Echoes‘ 2023 debut album, Writhing Tomb Amongst the Stars, this writer immediately spewed forth words while my mind was still boggled, among them such adjectives as “maniacal”, “freakish”, “insane”, and “demented”, and referenced the conjunction of “full-tilt demolition in the low end and spell-like alien wailings that seem to reach our shores from deep space”.

I also quoted a friend’s impressions: “If Choir meets Portal and Impetuous Ritual in Strapping Young Lad’s City is in your wheelhouse you can’t go wrong with this onslaught brought to you by Benjamin Vanweelden.”

Upon learning that Mr. Vanweelden had had recorded a second Venomous Echoes album that I, Voidhanger Records would be releasing this spring, I already knew that I would have to hear it, and that I would have to make sure before listening that I wouldn’t need my brain to function in even its usually disjointed condition for several hours afterward. No great shock to see that the album’s name is Split Formations And Infinite Mania.

Well, now I’ve listened, and I find myself in shuddering but exhilarated agreement with the label’s summing up of the new album as “an intimate and personal experience into a universal cosmic horror apocalypse”. Continue reading »

DÖDSRIT – NOCTURNAL WILL

Album Reviews No Responses »

Mar 182024

(Andy Synn kicks off his week with the new album from Dödsrit, out Friday)

There’s a certain type of person – trust me, I’ve encountered them a fair few times – who becomes inordinately angry if you try to talk about Dödsrit as being a “Black Metal” band.

But, of course, I highly doubt that Dödsrit themselves are all that fussed about the ongoing “he said, she said” of whether or not they’re “Black Metal enough” for the purists (surely that would be antithetical to the whole ethos of the genre anyway?) since they’ve been far too busy building an impressive career for themselves, on their own terms, to care about such petty concerns.

However – and here’s where things get interesting – the question of whether or not Dödsrit are still a Black Metal band, or how much of one they are, is actually very relevant when it comes to the release of their new album… though, perhaps, not quite in the way you might expect.

SHADES OF BLACK: VIRCOLAC, IARMHAIRT, TORTURERS’ LOBBY, JZOVCE, PORONIEC

Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET No Responses »

Mar 172024

Yesterday I read that in the annual St. Patrick’s Day parades in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, float riders toss cabbages and potatoes to the people on the street, a unique twist on the Mardi Gras practice of throwing strings of beads to revelers.

Although a flurry of cabbages would be entertaining, I’ll have to aim some other things at your head on this Paddy’s Day — spiky obsidian things dipped in poison or hallucinogens, some red with heat and some freezing.

Of course, I felt compelled to lead with music from a couple of Irish bands before crossing the waters east and west.

P.S. This column is late-appearing because I can’t hold my Saturday night Jameson shots and Guinness back like I used to. and my spouse and friends kept me up way past my bedtime. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ABORTED, BAT, DARKTHRONE, HÄMND, MY DYING BRIDE, NECROPHOBIC, TERMINAL NATION, ULCERATE

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Mar 162024

A hell of a party awaits below….

All the “big” names in this Saturday roundup of new songs and videos were suggested by my old friend and fellow NCS slave DGR — “big” in quotation marks because no surface-dwelling listener would remotely consider the music “radio friendly”.

But I still decided to throw in a few more subterranean offerings of my own choosing, all of it presented in alphabetical order by band name. That arrangement turned out to create some big twists and turns in the music.

ABORTED (Belgium)

First up, feast your eyes and ears on the music video for “Condemned To Rot” from Aborted‘s guest-studded new album Vault of Horrors. The guest stud on this one is Francesco Paoli from the NCS house band Fleshgod Apocalypse (does anyone remember when I used to call them that every time I mentioned them?). I’ll crib from my friend Andy‘s review of this album: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERESIARCH — “NOOSE ABOVE THE ABYSS”

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Mar 152024

Seven years have passed since Heresiarch‘s last album Death Ordinance (reviewed here), a long gap in new music segmented only by a pair of splits in 2019 and 2020 (the second of which, with Antediluvian, we premiered here). Now, at last, Heresiarch‘s second album Edifice is on the way, with a release date of April 12th established by Iron Bonehead Productions.

Our review of Death Ordinance referred to the music as “belligerent and bestial”, “militant, violent, and ruthless”, “an obliterating war metal juggernaut”, a “fusion of bloodthirsty primitivism and inhuman mechanisation”, and “a genuine tour de force”, with emphasis on “force”.

Even seven years later, no one would expect Heresiarch to make peace with the world or with their listeners, and on Edifice they haven’t. But as we’ll explain in more detail at a later time, the album’s unforgiving assault on the senses is a multifarious as well as nefarious experience, and the song we’re premiering today — “Noose Above the Abyss” — is a vivid and extremely unsettling sign of that. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEVOTION — “HORROR BEYOND THE STARS”

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Mar 152024

Having been first formed in 2012, the Spanish death metal band Devotion haven’t churned out their releases at a breathless pace. Their devotion to the old metal of death has been expressed more deliberately, and both the pacing of their releases and their stylistic evolutions have been influenced by lineup changes along the way.

What 2024 will bring us is the band’s third album in their dozen years of life, a record fittingly entitled Astral Catacombs that will be released by the Memento Mori label on April 22nd. To help introduce it, today we present a song whose title — and music — spawns thoughts of Lovecraftian terrors. Continue reading »

TRANSMISSIBLE SPONGIFORM ENCEPHALOPATHIES OF ’23 — PART VI

MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2023 No Responses »

Mar 152024

(Our editor Islander wasn’t able to compile a list of Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs from 2023, but our supporter Vizzah Harri, a resident of Hanoi, Vietnam, has stepped in to fill the void. We’ve already published Parts 1-5 of his list (find those here), and now we’re proceeding with Part 6 — almost the final part.)

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies of ’23 – Part VI (of 6.16… because the sacred number is 13, my mom is – no word of a lie – the 13th child and even though they grew up rather Christian, French-influenced paganism still had a strong hold and they called themselves the 12 after you-know-who’s acolytes, seeing as baby #12 sadly didn’t make it. 6+1+6 equals 13 and if isopsephy is mangled by the kind of imposter disordered numerologist that tattooed a clock pointing to 3:37 on his left shoulder seeing as his idol growing up was Anthony Kiedis and Scar tissue was exactly that length, then why not use that number as the final installment?

This gives you an idea where my style sprouts from, ‘that’ Riot Hyatt McCarthy–word-salad spitter, sprinkle in some filth, and garnish it with the dust of your dreams served next to a walled orchard and you get my meander. 666 added up is just eighteen, ask the Greeks, they would know. And yes, I’m therefore doing an Islander and adding one more with links to all the tracks that there is not enough sand in the hourglass for to keep writing about last year. Continue reading »

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